Almost five years since its debut, Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum’s novel ‘A Day of Small Beginnings’ has been reborn, this time as the chosen work for the One Book, One Chicago program. The book, which explores issues of Jewish identity, community and history, was selected by Spertus, Chicago’s center for Jewish learning and culture, and is the centerpiece of a month-long series of lectures, performances and displays inspired by the novel. The One Book concept was originated in 1998 by the Washington Center for the Book as a way to bring communities together to read and discuss a common book. The Spertus program will include Jewish storytelling, paper cutting and dance’all strong plot elements that are woven through the novel. Rosenbaum’s book offers a rich opportunity to probe the meaning of Jewish identity, a particularly pertinent question for Jews whose ancestors experienced the Diaspora and whose history has been so often obliterated and forgotten. Rosenbaum, a Marquez resident, emerged from a nonreligious background curious about questions of faith and drawn to wrestling with the philosophical ideas. Her mother, a dancer and sculptor, claimed that art was all the spiritual sustenance the family needed. Rosenbaum studied Jewish history and theology at New York University, and after graduating she spent a year studying international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When she came home, she worked for the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. After obtaining a law degree from Loyola and working for five years on constitutional questions, she admitted to herself that the law was not for her. After the birth of her first daughter, Rosenbaum began pursuing her writing with Palisadian Barbara Abercrombie. Rosenbaum and her husband Walter, a lawyer, have two daughters, Ariana, a junior at the University of Wisconsin, and Maya, a senior at Palisades High School. The idea for the book sprang to life in 1995, while Rosenbaum was on a trip to Poland with her in-laws and visited their hometown of Zwolen, southeast of Warsaw (the fictionalized Zokof in the novel). No Jews remained in the town, nor much of their history except for a small collection amassed by a Polish music teacher. He invited the family into his house and showed them bits and pieces of the Jewish world that had once thrived in the town’mezuzahs, pages from books and a piece of a woman’s gravestone he had saved. ‘He was the caretaker of this town,’ Rosenbaum says. Rosenbaum pondered the importance of a caretaker, or gatekeeper, as she calls the one who remains in the Old World to remember the history. In the introduction to the novel, she relates the story of her own uncle, Lloyd Rodwin, a MIT professor who visited Poland in the late 1970s at the invitation of Warsaw University. Visiting the birthplace of his father, Lomze, her uncle realized he didn’t know of a single landmark by which he might recognize his father’s world. ‘The story, scarcely an anecdote, suggested to me something so uniquely part of the American experience: the loss of one’s family history once the journey to the New World has been made,’ Rosenbaum writes in the introduction of her book. ‘I wondered, what if a gatekeeper had remained in the Old World to tell the tale. And so began ‘A Day of Small Beginnings.” Rosenbaum’s story opens in 1906, in the small Jewish cemetery of Zoko, where young Itzik Leiber has wakened the spirit of Freidl Alterman from death. Trapped in the world between life and death, Freidl helps generations of the Leiber family unlock the mysteries of their past. To complement the month-long program of events at Spertus, Rosenbaum will travel to Chicago to give a talk at the Wilmette Public Library about the book and her own discoveries. Never expecting the resurrection of ‘A Day of Small Beginnings,’ Rosenbaum had already begun research on a new book wherein she considers another lost history, that of Cahokia, the center of Mississippian Indian culture, the largest pre-Columbian community in North America which built the monumental mounds in southern Illinois (900-1300 BCE).
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